Foreword
It is a genuine pleasure to provide this foreword to what will certainly become a key volume for the integration of the long-term perspective (longue durée) with present and future efforts to cope with hazards to the environment and human welfare. As Payson Sheets and Jago Cooper emphasize in their introduction and overview chapter, this group of contributors draws upon an impressive range of disciplines and well-developed case studies from around the globe. They are united in a growing movement among archaeologists, environmental historians, and paleoecologists to make a well-understood past serve to create a more genuinely sustainable future and increase human resilience in the face of both gradual and sudden change (Constanza, Graumlich, and Steffen 2007; Crumley 1994; Dugmore et al. 2007; Fisher, Hill, and Feinman 2009; Hornberg, McNeill, and Martinez-Alier 2007; Kirch 1997, 2007; Kohler and van der Leeuw 2007; Marks 2007; McGovern et al 2007; Norberg et al. 2008; Redman et al. 2004; Rick and Erlandson 2008; Sabloff 1998).
THE EAGLE HILL MEETING, OCTOBER 2009
The editors and contributors are also connected by their participation in the three-day Global Long-term Human Ecodynamics Conference hosted by the Humboldt Field Research Institute at its excellent facility in Eagle Hill, Maine, on October 16–19, 2009 (http://www.eaglehill.us/). The conference was generously funded by a grant from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), Office of Polar Programs (OPP), Arctic Social Sciences Program, as part of President Barack Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Our OPP grants officer, Dr. Anna Kerttula de Echave, played an invaluable and inspirational role before, during, and after what proved to be an incredibly energized and successful meeting. The Eagle Hill meeting grew out of discussions with the NSF about the desirability of harvesting fresh data and perspectives acquired by some of the large-scale projects funded under new cross-disciplinary initiatives, including the NSF Biocomplexity competition, the Human and Social Dimensions of Global Change program, and the International Polar Year (2007–2009), as well as various European interdisciplinary programs (BOREAS, Leverhulme Trust projects), to promote more effective interregional (especially north-south) communication and integration of teams, cases, and new ideas. In spring 2009 a team drawn from the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) research and education cooperative (Andy Dugmore of the University of Edinburgh, Sophia Perdikaris and Tom McGovern of CUNY, and Astrid Ogilvie of the University of Colorado) was tasked with organizing a working conference that would connect teams and scholars active in diverse areas of human ecodynamics research and involve students participating in Sophia’s Islands of Change Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program. The October Eagle Hill meeting eventually had seventy-one faculty and student active participants, representing a dozen disciplines and nations worldwide. Prior to the meeting, participants interacted through the NABO website maintained by Dr. Anthony Newton (University of Edinburgh), and this on-line collaboration and preparation proved critical to the success of the meeting (for a full report on the Eagle Hill meeting and a list of faculty participants, see http://www.nabohome.org/meetings/glthec2009.html).
As part of the pre-meeting preparation we grouped participants into working groups, each with at least two chairs charged with organizing their groups, leading discussions before and during the meeting, and preparing presentations by each working group for discussion by the entire group. The teams and chairs were:
- Methods, Data, and Tools (chairs Doug Price and Tina Thurston): New analytic tools allow transformation in our abilities to trace migration, reconstruct diet, and reconstruct settlement. Some specialties and approaches are very recent in origin (stable isotopes, aDNA), and others have recently been able to significantly upgrade their general utility through expanded data resources (archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, geoarchaeology).
- Who Cares Wins (Shari Gearheard and Christian Keller): Education, community involvement, policy connections, and interdisciplinary engagement. Moving beyond outreach to mobilize traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) and local knowledge and expertise for global science. Engaging underrepresented sources of innovation and expanding human resources. Connecting science to the public and providing diversity to policy makers.
- Hazards and Impacts (Payson Sheets and Jago Cooper): Recurring hazards, differential impacts, long-term lessons for vulnerability and resilience, successful and unsuccessful models of response and adaptation.
- Climate Change (Socorro Lozano and Lisa Kennedy): Climate change impacts, threshold crossings, adaptation versus resilience, past lessons for future impacts.
- Models and Visualization (Shripad Tuljapurkar and Tiffany Vance): Digital resources for education, data integration and dissemination, integrative modeling, and exploration of complex causality and complex self-organizing adaptive systems.
- Coping and Scale (Tate Paulette and Jeff Quilter): Societies of different scales have produced cases of both failure and long-term sustainability in balancing demands of specialization, short-term efficiency, and long-term flexibility in the face of discontinuous but often rapid changes in natural and social environments.
- Ecodynamics of Modernity (Steve Mozorowski and Jim Woollett): Past “world system” impacts since CE 1250, commoditization, repeated pandemic impacts, climate change, Columbian exchange, mass migration, cross-scale integration and linkage, maximum potential for integration of history, ethnography, archaeology, and multi-indicator environmental science.
All of these team presentations provoked intense and productive discussions (some of which lasted far into the night), but the Hazards and Impacts team led by Payson and Jago was a clear “star” session among many very strong contenders. In part, this reflected the dynamic of the conference, where all participants were deeply committed to using their expertise to make concrete and practical contributions to improving the lives of present and future residents in their research areas. As discussed fully in Jago and Payson’s introductory chapter, hazards research provides a well-structured venue for the long-term perspective to have immediate and positive benefits, and this has attracted contributors from other Eagle Hill teams to what had been the Hazards and Impacts team project.
THE GLOBAL HUMAN ECODYNAMICS ALLIANCE (GHEA)
The Eagle Hill meeting resulted in a strong consensus to continue and broaden discussions begun in Maine, drawing in more teams, disciplines, and world areas to achieve a genuinely global perspective that could take on projects such as this excellent volume, as well as sponsor field and laboratory collaborations, student training, public education, and engagement with global change science. This consensus led to a proposal to organize and launch a new Global Human Ecodynamics Alliance (GHEA). Ben Fitzhugh (University of Washington) generously agreed to take on the work of launching the group and a series of meetings in Arizona (hosted by Peggy Nelson and her team), Edinburgh (hosted by Andy Dugmore jointly with the Scottish Alliance for Geoscience, Environment, and Science [SAGES]), and St. Louis (organized by Ben at the Society for American Archaeology meetings). GHEA is now up and running with its new official website created by Anthony (www.gheahome.org).
GHEA is intended to be an open, loosely structured, and very flexible group (down low in the “r” area of the classic resilience metaphor loop) that will seek to build community and aid scholars, students, and members of the wider public in connecting across national and disciplinary boundaries. All are invited to participate and join through the website. GHEA is rapidly evolving in response to member interests, but some bullet points incorporated into GHEA from the Eagle Hill meeting may indicate shared interests:
- Productive Engagement with Global Change and Challenges of Sustainability
- Promoting Diversity of Knowledge Sources
- Integration of Policy, Education, Outreach, Community Participation in Global Science
- Spatial Patterning, Place-Based Learning, Longitudinal Research Programs
- Critical Times and Places: thresholds, tipping points, regime shifts.
This book is an early product of the Global Human Ecodynamics Alliance and sets a high standard for future GHEA collaborations.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND THANKS
We would like to thank our hosts in Eagle Hill, Maine, for a memorable conference venue, and we gratefully acknowledge the dedication and sleep deprivation of the CUNY REU team (Marissa Gamiliel, Reaksha Persaud, and Jessica Vobornik) and CUNY doctoral student Cory Look, who also handled many IT issues and logistics so competently. We also thank CUNY doctoral students Amanda Schreiner and George Hambrecht for heroic long-distance late night driving. We are all greatly indebted to Shari Gearheard, whose amazing recording and synthesizing skills preserved an excellent record of fast-moving and intense discussions. This conference was funded by an American Recovery and Reconstruction Act grant from the National Science Foundation, Office of Polar Programs, Arctic Social Sciences Program (NSF OPP ASSP #0947852), and supplements to the NABO International Polar Year Arctic Social Science Program grant (NSF OPP ASSP #0732327), for which we are profoundly grateful.
On a personal note, I particularly thank Payson and Jago for their incredible energy and dedication at every stage of this collaboration. From energizing their working group at the Eagle Hill conference through every phase of securing NSF subvention support for the book project to organizing the rapid and effective peer review through arranging the innovative and effective publication format in close collaboration with the University Press of Colorado, they have proved to be a remarkably talented and exceptionally capable team. Many thanks to the editors.